As the big data era takes hold, it is time to sit down with the business and sort out what IT can do to provide a fully supportive data platform for the future, says analysts Clive Longbottom and Rob Bamforth from Quocirca.

Many businesses are turning to managed security services as a means of addressing the difficulty associated with deploying and managing multiple-point security systems, according to this report from Frost & Sullivan.

This analyst paper from Quocirca looks at the benefits that every organisation – whether it is incurring expenses, dealing with the claims process, or processing, reporting or analysing the financial impact on an organisation – should be looking to get from a travel and expenses management system.

In this continuing series of articles, Quocirca analysts look at the key issues affecting network design and management. 12 articles address topics including the truthfulness of suppliers, service level agreements and the impact of chief data officers.

In this report from the Enterprise Mobility Exchange, specially prepared for Computer Weekly readers, find out where IT professionals are investing around mobile applications, device management and security, and learn about some of the drivers behind the key trends in the enterprise mobile market.

The mechanics of team formation are well known, but the User Acceptance Testing (UAT) team has a unique challenge – to acquire the skills it needs, to form an effective team quickly and then to take on a challenging task and complete it in a very short time.
This chapter, taken from the book User acceptance testing, a step by step guide, explains how to put together an effective and successful UAT team.

Big data has not yet led to big outcomes. Despite all the hype, less than half of all employees find that corporate information helps them get their jobs done.
The problem of getting the right information to the right people at the right time is getting worse with the growing number of information sources, uses, and users.
Our previous research discussed how CIOs should help foster informed skepticism to boost the ability of employees to use big data for better decisions. This study discusses the CIO’s role in making big data attainable and useful.

In this 11-page buyer’s guide, Computer Weekly looks at the business benefits of data management tools and methods of analysing the stored data, along with some examples of how this data is being used to innovate.

In this 10-page buyer’s guide, Computer Weekly looks at the mindset and technology businesses need to analyse various forms of data, the low-cost solid state memory powering datastreams from social network feeds and the industrial internet and a revision of the traditional approach of matching back-end infrastructure to application requirements.

In this nine-page buyer’s guide to big data, Computer Weekly discovers how businesses can use data to their advantage. Big data may appear to be just another bandwagon, but it is important, and needs to be addressed carefully and sensibly.

The O-TTPS is an open standard containing a set of guidelines that when properly adhered to have been shown to enhance the security of the global supply chain and the integrity of Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) ICT products.
It provides a set of guidelines, requirements, and recommendations that help assure against maliciously tainted and counterfeit products throughout the COTS ICT product life cycle encompassing the following phases: design, sourcing, build, fulfillment, distribution, sustainment, and disposal.

This special 7-page report from Computer Weekly, updated for 2014, analyses the challenges facing Adobe, its financial performance, the services and products it offers, its place in the IT market and its future strategy.

BCG projects that the value created through digital identity could be: €1 trillion in Europe by 2020, or roughly 8% of the combined GDP of the EU-27. For European businesses and governments, the use of personal data will deliver an annual benefit of €330 billion by 2020—bringing growth to an otherwise stagnant economy.
An increase in newly available data on consumers will meaningfully shift market shares. But without consumer trust, most of the trillions of dollars of social and economic value promised from big data will go to waste. BCG estimates that two-thirds of the total value potential stands to be lost if companies / organisations fail to establish a trusted flow of personal data
This report from Boston Consulting Group, based on surveys of 10,000 people, takes the temperature on how consumers around the world are feeling about the collection and use of personal data. Looking at how this varies by country, generation, and by industry, and also at how significant the gains can be for companies if they successfully build the consumer's trust in gathering and use of data.

Big data—dubbed “the new oil” by the World Economic Forum—can improve decision making, reduce time to market and increase profits. But it can also raise significant risk, ranging from disastrous data breaches to privacy and compliance concerns.
To help enterprises retain control of their massive and fast-changing information, ISACA has issued new guidance/ Privacy and Big Data: An ISACA White Paper outlines critical governance and assurance considerations and lists 26 key questions.

On a small scale, the effects of software are benign. But at large companies, institutions, and agencies with hundreds of millions of users, something so apparently small as the choice of what should be a default setting has an immediate impact on the daily behavior patterns of a large percentage of the planet’s population.

The primary audiences for this Paper are business and IT managers who are responsible for the performance of operations. However, enterprise architects also play a key role in supporting IT governance, including architecture governance.
Governance is defined as giving direction to activities. In this Paper, the authors focus on governance of the IT domain and its alignment to business. Governance is viewed as a mechanism that influences the internal logic and decision-making of organizations. The internal logic is defined as a compromise between practically conflicting parameters. The mechanism that has to deal with these conflicting parameters consists of decision domains, governance structure, social processes between individuals and groups, and controls to ensure the proper functioning of IT governance. In the context of IT governance, enterprise architecture can be considered as a means for coordination of decision-making related to IT and business. Furthermore, it is recognized that enterprise architecture in its own right also needs to be governed.

This extract from the book by Alan W. Brown, Jerry Fishenden and Mark Thompson focuses on how the move to digital – built on open standards – is transforming the public sector's relationship with its citizens.

Analysts Clive Longbottom and Bernt Østergaard offer guidelines for those wanting to move to a co-location facility and who want to make sure their selection procedures cover all the criteria required to make the appropriate choice.

Organisations are faced with an ever-increasing flow of different data types, including formal, database transactional information as well as less structured documents, voice and video.
Within this mix of data types lies the intellectual property of a given organisation – and ensuring that it is in a format that can be easily mined and monetised is an on-going battle. Big data will be part of this, but other issues have to be taken into account.
To uncover the true value hidden in the mass of data under the control of a given organisation requires a cohesive and coherent approach to information management. Quocirca believes that this needs a fully integrated system that acts on data streams, rather than taking actions on already stored data, and that there are multiple functions – such as data meta-tagging, deduplication, indexing, search and reporting – to ensure that the intellectual property assets can be optimally discovered and managed.

In this Computer Weekly buyer’s guide to virtual desktops, we investigate the latency and bandwidth issues that arise with thin client access, take a look at cloud economics in the datacentre, review Citrix’s XenDesktop 5 desktop virtualisation application, and see how virtualisation and business process optimisation work at the Co-operative

Working out how to make infrastructure on demand work for your company is a challenge. In this 10-page buyer's guide, Computer Weekly looks at assessing the needs of your business, assess how a lack of standards is hindering progress, and assess Microsoft's Azure which aims to become an operating system for the cloud.

How do we create agile organisations and behave in a more agile way? What does it take to create a fast-paced, dynamic, innovative and customer centric organisation? Why should we be thinking about agile working at all?
Kelly Waters executive Consultant, Coach, and Interim CTO, offers some answers in this presentation geared for CIOs

The hype around digital marketing has led to many reports that CMOs will spend more than CIOs on IT. The implications of this hypothesis come with the same air of confidence: that CIOs are destined to start working for CMOs, or that CIO– CMO conflict is inevitable. These predictions greatly overestimate likely technology spending by CMOs, and more importantly, they are based on a misunderstanding of what CMOs really want. In this study, we debunk these myths and show how CIOs can play a critical role in accelerating digital marketing.

The Accenture Technology Vision 2014 identifies six technology trends that are enabling large enterprises to push the boundaries of innovation and take advantage of digital technologies for competitive advantage.
Leading enterprises are pursuing digital strategies that leverage mobility, analytics, and cloud to improve business processes, take advantage of real-time intelligence, expand the boundaries of traditional workforces, and transform the way data is managed and used.

Existing analytics approaches meet point needs for specific roles within an organisation. However, how analysis is carried out, and the roles of people who will be carrying out the analysis, will need to adapt dynamically to meet the organisation’s changing needs. The analysis of a blend of multiple different data sources will help to add distinct business value to an organisation. This report will be of interest to those tasked with ensuring that a suitable data management and analysis platform is implemented within their organisation to provide a strategic, flexible, long-term analytics platform.

Albert Ellis, Chief Executive for Harvey Nash, highlights some of the IT trends we can expect to see in 2014.
In this presentation, given to Computer Weekly’s 500 Club for IT leaders, Albert Ellis talks about about the major IT recruitment, skills and career development issues in 2014.

IT leaders and storage managers can realise cost savings and improve their use of backup infrastructure by rethinking their back-up procedures. Cloud services are attractive options for selected workloads, as they alleviate the burden on the data centre backup infrastructure.

Are Facilities and IT data centre managers implacable enemies, or is it just a need for different priorities and emphases on work that seem to get in the way?
Often, Quocirca finds that an organisation has one team – facilities management (FM) – looking after the physical facility of the data centre, with another – information technology (IT) – looking after the servers, storage and network equipment, along with the software running within it. This can lead to problems where priorities clash, or where a lack of common language or views of a problem can stop things from happening.

2012 was a year when organisations had to face up to the fact that the basis of IT was beginning to change. Energy costs were rapidly escalating, new technical architectures, such as cloud computing, were coming to the fore and users were off doing their own things. The potential impact on the data centre was massive – and the following report pulls together articles written by Quocirca for SearchVirtualDataCentre (now part of ComputerWeekly) throughout 2012.

The Single UNIX Specification programming environment provides a broad-based functional set of
interfaces to support the porting of existing UNIX applications and the development of new applications.
The environment also supports a rich set of tools for application development.

BYOD is proliferating, but the smart move is to recognise that the device is ultimately far less important than the applications it runs and the data it has access to, write analysts Rob Bamford and Clive Longbottom.

Identity and access management (IAM) systems are today used by the majority of European enterprises. Many of these are still installed on-premise but increasingly they are being supplemented by the use of on-demand IAM services (IAMaaS). The overall uptake represents a big increase from when Quocirca last surveyed the market in 2009.
Whilst IAM is important for managing the access rights of increasingly mobile employees, three other major drivers have encouraged businesses to invest despite the tight economic conditions: the opening up of more and more applications to external users, the growing use of cloud based services and the rise of social media. The ultimate aim with all three is to nurture new business processes, thereby finding and exploiting new opportunities
This report presents new research into the use and benefits of IAM and the relationship it has with these three drivers. It should be of interest to anyone wanting to better serve all types of users, whilst still keeping control over applications and data.

In the previous article in this series, we showed you how to secure a Mac using the functions built into its operating system, OS X.
These functions range from simple password protection and patch management through to full-disk encryption.
However, these are not the only security functions available. Indeed, OS X has a whole security and management infrastructure available for administrators called Managed Preferences, which can be managed most easily using OS X Server.

Most mid market organisations acknowledge that they cannot achieve best-in-class application performance, availability and security, at an affordable cost, based purely on their own resources.
To deliver a given application effectively requires the help of an IT service provider (ITSP). The conundrum is finding the right partner with both an applications focus and flexible access to the necessary resources to adapt as workload and technology change.
The research presented in this report shows the extent to which UK-based midmarket IT leaders recognise these problems and how effectively they are working with ITSPs to deliver improved services to their business.

This tool provides a single page scorecard for comparing vendors across 14 weighted factors. It generates an overall score for each vendor along with a risk assessment based on the weighting of the factors.
(End-user organizations may use this tool to analyse technology decisions but the tool may not be redistributed or modified in any way. Please contact Nucleus Research client services for further information.)

In this buyer’s guide to outsourcing, we look at these issues in depth, as well as identifying trends in the market and investigating the outsourcing options available to small and medium-sized businesses.

Analytics is a key enabler for life sciences and healthcare organizations to create better outcomes for patients, customers and other stakeholders across the entire healthcare ecosystem.
While almost two-thirds of organizations across the healthcare ecosystem have analytics strategies in place, this research from IBM shows that only a fifth are driving analytics adoption across the enterprise.
The key barriers are a lack of data management capabilities and skilled analysts, as well as poor organizational change management. To develop and translate insights into actions that enhance outcomes, organizations will need to collaborate across an expanding ecosystem.

The convergence of market volatility, the empowered worker, globalization and accelerating technological developments is making it harder than ever for organisations to maintain a sustainable advantage.
Gone are the days when businesses created a unique selling proposition and lived off it for years on end. Today, at best one can only hope for a temporary advantage.
Today reinvention feels more like a daily habit than a major event. Customers are in the driving seat and, as such will simply migrate to where they are best served.
Acquiring new customers is very expensive so organisational survival is dependent on the organisation’s ability to retain its customers.
Consequently customer-centricity must lie at the heart of the organisation’s strategy. This has significant implications on every aspect of the organisation’s operations.

Code Halo refers to the data that accumulates around people, devices, and organizations—data that’s robust, powerful, and continually growing in richness and complexity. The halos contain the code that companies, brands, employers, and partners can use to enhance their understanding of people or objects more deeply.
Decoding the information within that invisible field, teasing out the insights, and creating new commercial models does not happen automatically or easily. But every employee, product, building, and organization should have a Code Halo, and this book is going to explain how and why.
While technology makes Code Halos possible, they transcend constructs like IT or Big Data or analytics. Code Halos make meaningful connections between people, organizations, and devices in a business context. Extracting meaning from Code Halos—and applying that understanding to business strategies and practices—is a new and essential yet not clearly or widely understood management skill.
This book’s extract’s purpose is to provide a fact-based understanding of the Code Halo phenomenon and outline a practical approach to improving performance by harnessing their power.

The Security Forum is a membership group of security experts from both the customer and supply sides of industry, government, and academia, who share a common aim to raise confidence levels in IT business operations.
We identify information security business requirements and develop standards and guides that respond to them. Our global scope looks across all industries towards what is common to all, benefiting IT suppliers and consumers alike. Our security strategy is focused on Security Architectures and Security Management – see our current list of projects, overleaf. We host quarterly Security Practitioners Conferences, where invited expert speakers address strategic issue within our interest areas.

in this 10-page buyer’s guide, Computer Weekly looks at ensuring productivity is not affected, how to make the most of an employee’s own digital identity and how to find a balance between the needs of the business and regulatory requirements.

On October 25, 2013, the European Council concluded that the new Data Protection Framework should be adopted in a timely manner in order to strengthen consumer and business trust in Europe’s digital economy.The Council did, however, refuse to commit to adoption by early next year.
This conclusion follows on the heels of the European Parliament’s Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE) Committee vote setting out its position on a compromise text of the draft Regulation on October 21, 2013.
After some 18 months of intense discussions and lobbying, the compromise text was passed by the LIBE Committee with a 49-3 majority. The compromise text was heavily influenced by the revelations of the surveillance activities of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA).
This report from Morrison & Foerster, sets out some of the most important changes for private sector organizations proposed by the LIBE Committee.

As the smartphone phenomenon has taken off, chief information security officers have needed to rethink what personal computing security really means –especially as the European Commission seeks to harmonise data protection law across EU member states.

As the big data era takes hold, it is time to sit down with the business and sort out what IT can do to provide a fully supportive data platform for the future, says analysts Clive Longbottom and Rob Bamforth from Quocirca.

Dealing with large volumes of mixed data to give better business insights.
The data warehouse is struggling to keep pace with an organisation’s data needs. Extraction, transformation and loading (ETL) tasks are being stretched beyond their capabilities, and organisations wedded to maintaining a standard ETL, relational data approach are finding that they have to cut corners in order to get some level of results from their analysis and reporting. However, a different approach can add a lot more value – and make the data warehouse work again.

This report from the Centre for Economics and Business Research (Cebr), discusses the economic arguments for placing ‘data’ as an asset on the company balance sheet and in the wider financial reporting framework.
Data that enable a company to improve customer relations, streamline production or develop new products are providing future economic benefit and should be regarded as assets.
It is increasingly important that firms are able to account for their data. Firstly, regulatory and compliance initiatives are putting greater emphasis on the quality of data and resulting decision-making in the aftermath of the financial crisis.
Secondly, for financial reasons, data that play an increasingly important role in value creation must be recognised if they are to be accorded appropriate priority by company decision-makers.

Big data presents many CRM opportunities, but to be effective and derive business value, customer insights generated by well-managed and analysed big data must be put into action.
During the next few years, most companies will struggle to realise customer relationship management (CRM) business value from big data strategies. The first key to success will be identifying relevant customer processes across marketing, sales, customer service and e-commerce that can benefit from actionable, big data customer insights.
Once a customer process has been identified as a big data opportunity, CRM leaders working with CIOs should follow four critical steps to derive business value:

Increasing globalisation and diversity of both the suppliers and customers a given organisation has to deal with mean that supply chains are becoming ever more complex. Maintaining capabilities across broad functions requires systems that are well integrated, audited, secure and capable of being reported on at a granular level. Cloud-based approaches introduce new opportunities to gain access to advanced functionality, but also introduce issues around B2B integration for organisations.

Information is the lifeblood of an enterprise in a knowledge-based economy, but most are awash in a sea of data unable to leverage their information holdings to gain competitive advantage and/or improve services. This “big data” challenge is projected to increase significantly over time and provide major opportunities to those willing to move their organizations from a “data rich” to an “information smart” environment.
This White Paper from the Open Group assesses the “big data” problem, proposes business and architecture visions, and develops an Enterprise Information Planning and Architecture Model. The vision and model will assist companies to systematically develop their information holdings and related services to achieve business value.
The paper is based upon global best practices in business and government and addresses the lifecycle management of all types of information holdings and services from transaction processing to advanced decision support to records and archiving.
This report is targeted at Business Planners and Analysts as well as Enterprise and Information Architecture practitioners. It is also of interest to all other professionals engaged in data, information, and knowledge management.

This briefing from leading European law firms highlights the key legal requirements for companies monitoring employees’ social media use in France, Germany, UK and Italy
The briefing is based on a seminar by the law firms: SKW (Germany), Portolano (Italy), Bersay (France), and Kemp Little (UK) in London on 30th April 2013.

The use of social media has become common in modern recruiting processes. Social media enables employers to present themselves online, to inform third parties about current vacancies in their enterprise and to conduct background checks on applicants alongside official application documents.
This briefing from 4 leading European law firms gives you the key legal facts on using social media for recruitment, pre-employment screening and background checks on potential job candidates.
The briefing is based on a seminar by the law firms: SKW (Germany), Portolano (Italy), Bersay (France), at the offices of Kemp Little (UK) in London on 30th April 2013.

This downloadable extract focuses on the practical elements of business continuity management and considers them from a management system perspective: Where should the emphasis be when it comes to fitting your Business Continuity Management (BCM) arrangements into a management system?
The chapter uses six phases of the BCM lifecycle as a focal point and offer top tips for you to consider when developing your Business Continuity Management System (BCMS).

In this chapter from the second edition of his book, Morris outlines PDMv2 and show how it overcomes common data migration problems by using a set of integrated modules that cover the whole scope of a data migration from project start-up to legacy decommissioning and beyond. The chapter also gives a brief overview of the types of software technology available to support data migration.

With pressure mounting on organisations to reduce their environmental impact, sustainability is still high on the corporate IT agenda, despite the challenging economy.
Although interest in green IT is growing, the impact of printing is often overlooked. However, left uncontrolled, it can be a huge source of waste – both financial and environmental.
A “less-paper” office based on an optimised print infrastructure can be a prime enabler for sustainability.
Using intelligent print management and document workflow tools can enable organisations to significantly reduce their environmental impact while cutting costs, driving operational efficiency and improving regulatory compliance.

This briefing from law-firm DLA Piper looks at the main types of data centre services that are available on the market, common pitfalls to avoid when purchasing data centre services and some of the key legal and commercial issues to consider.

This briefing from leading European law offers practical legal advice for organisations who want to use social in France, Germany, UK and Italy.
The briefing is based on a seminar by the law firms: SKW (Germany), Portolano (Italy), Bersay (France), at the offices of Kemp Little (UK) in London on 30th April 2013.

This third cycle of the next generation data centre (NGD) research, shows that progress in how organisations in the UK, Europe and the Middle East, are preparing for changes in the way ITC is used to support their businesses has stalled for many organisations.
However, detailed analysis shows how those who are investing in certain areas – and just changing the mind-set of how they approach ITC – are well ahead of those who are just trying to save money.

Is the demand to keep up with the latest IT trends leaving the back-office functions of security and supply chain management and data analysis to wither on the vine? Our eight-page Buyer’s Guide to Retail IT assesses the implications and challenges facing CIOs and senior IT professionals.

Keith Bucknall, head of Strategy, Architecture & Infrastructure for Lloyds motor insurer, ERS, looks at the data protection challenges faced by the organisation, in this PowerPoint presentation for Computer Weekly’s 500 Club for IT leaders. You can read more about his presentation here.

An organisation has multiple stakeholders that need to be communicated with or reported to on a regular basis. Employees, partners, customers and suppliers are part of this community, alongside shareholders, trade and government bodies.
Ensuring that all the stakeholders’ information needs are met requires a holistic approach to managing information – the creation of a GRC platform.

Changes in how technology can be implemented and improvements in connectivity mean that business continuity and rapid systems recovery is now within the reach of many more organisations.
Combined with granular information recovery, organisations should now be looking at creating a multi-level strategy to ensure not only survival, but also on-going business capabilities through any impact on the technical platform.

The network is a dynamic place and the knock-on impact on the rest of IT is more than just a case of occasional lost connectivity or slow response.
This report contains 12 short articles that look not just at direct wide area network (WAN)issues, but also at other areas of the ITC platform and the possible impact on an organisation.

Legislation, judicial review through the FISA Court, and testimony have failed utterly in terms of providing meaningful oversight - both historically and currently – over the US electronic intelligence gathering organisation, the NSA, 4 former senior NSA staff argue in this report. They present their recommendations for reform.
This report was compiled by 4 former senior NSA staff:
William Binney, former Technical Director, World Geopolitical & Military Analysis; Co-founder of the SIGINT Automation Research Center.
Thomas Drake, former Defense Intelligence Senior Executive Service, NSA
Edward Loomis, former Chief, SIGINT Automation Research Center, NSA
J. Kirk Wiebe, former Senior Analyst, SIGINT Automation Research Center, NSA

While the pace of the move to open source in the public sector has been slow so far, a number of factors are converging to determine the blueprint for its future use in government IT.
These include the Cabinet Office’s consultation to define the use of open standards in government and G-Cloud, which is supposed to make it easier and less costly to become a government supplier.
This guide takes you through the initiatives under way and reveals how they could benefit your business.

In this 11-page buyer’s guide, Computer Weekly looks at how government publishes open data and the applications – such as those to mitigate the worst damage of the floods in early 2014 – developers find for it; the interest local authorities are taking in these; and the tools the private sector offers to fully exploit the data governments collect.

Find out why agile software development is outstripping traditional testing practices, how to keep code in good shape during agile development and how to optimise the performance and security of web-based business applications in this 12 page guide.

This book shows you how to architect, design, plan, and deploy Microsoft security technologies for Windows 8/Server 2012 in the enterprise. The book covers security technologies that apply to both client and server and enables you to identify and deploy Windows 8 security features in your systems based on different business and deployment scenarios.
The book is a single source for learning how to secure Windows 8 in many systems, including core, endpoint, and anywhere access
This chapter shows you how to plan platform security, assess your security, controls and monitoring requirements

The fast growing interaction between email, collaborative environments and social media usage on both fixed and mobile devices is putting pressure on the corporate management of these activities. Inability to manage this surge may result in inefficiencies, security issues and damage to corporate credibility. General system management tools lack the detailed ability to seamlessly monitor, manage, plan and update core business messaging and collaboration environments, notably Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint environments. This paper from analyst group Quocirca offers some answers.

Version 3 of the Java Card smart card specification, released in March 2008, overhauled the technical architecture of the smart card.
The Connected Edition of the specification introduced a significantly enhanced execution environment and a new virtual machine. It includes new network-oriented features, support for web applications with new Servlet APIs, multi-threading and support for applets with extended and advanced capabilities.
Such features add complexity to the smart card platform and the hosted applications, increasing the attack surface and introducing a multitude of vulnerabilities. The security models, testing and risk management programmes must cater for these susceptibilities.
In this article we consider the new features of the Connected Edition and identify some of the security problems that developers need to be aware of.

This report explores how the banking industry architecture network (Bian) service landscape may be used to define a comprehensive commercial blueprint that could be used to cloud-enable the banking industry.

Lee Ayling, management consulting partner at KPMG, highlights some of the key IT trends we can expect to see in 2014.
In this presentation, given to Computer Weekly's 500 Club for IT leaders, Lee Ayling talks about the business and economic trends IT leaders need to look out for in 2014.

On September 9th, 2002 Walmart announced that it had selected software from a small company called iSoft to power its new Internet-based EDI system. This was the shot heard round the world in the EDI industry.
The new Internet EDI technology, called AS2, would circumvent the VANs, enabling businesses to exchange transactions directly over the Internet.
Walmart’s announcement had catastrophic impacts to the EDI VAN business that had a virtual monopoly on supply chain B2B transactions for decades.
Most analysts would place the EDI VAN sector in the category of a melting ice cube. In fact, in 2002 experts predicted that EDI VANs would be dead by the year 2010, if not 2005. However, the EDI VAN business is still a $1 billion sector in the year 2012.

Clearly “book learning” is a critical first step to becoming effective at anything. But the effectiveness, potential, and the degree and value of contribution rise to a new level as relevant skills and experience are gained in a topical area. It is clearly important to “know” a subject, but it is more valuable to have applied that knowledge.
It is for this reason that The Open Group IT Specialist Certification (ITSC) program is based on an assessment of people skills, technical skills, and experience, not just tests of knowledge.

Many businesses are turning to managed security services as a means of addressing the difficulty associated with deploying and managing multiple-point security systems, according to this report from Frost & Sullivan.

HR directors in companies large and small are grappling with selecting and implementing HR systems that need to enhance the business and add long-term value. We pretty much have the HR systems that we asked for and yet most of us agree that our HR systems do not meet our expectations or those of the business. Why? We asked the wrong questions during selection and implementation.

Nucleus Research examined Tableau Software’s use of Salesforce Data.com to help the company quickly identify sales leads across regions and to manage its customer data within a single, centralised solution.
Benefits included increased bookings through greater lead generation and increased productivity through more accurate sales data and more precise territory distributions.

Reliable software applications are as critical for mid-market businesses as they are for enterprises.
Choosing the right platform is the key to ensuring that applications are available, scalable, cost effective, compliant and secure.
With the growing variety of physical, virtual and cloud-based platforms to choose from for application deployment, many will value the advice of third party experts as they plan the evolution of legacy applications or deploy new ones.
This report looks at the issues that mid-market IT and business managers need to take into account when deciding how to deploy applications and when they should consider turning to managed service providers (MSP) for resources and advice.
This research should be of interest to those who are focused on delivering their organisation’s core value proposition, whilst also considering how this is best underpinned by IT.

As the IT industry reaches maturity, IT departments should think of themselves not as data centres but as manufacturing centres for information. IT is following in the footsteps of the telephone and electricity industry before it, and becoming a commodity.
The mission, whether IT knows it or not, is to provide information to its customer when they need it, where they need it, in a form that they can use it, at a price that they are willing to pay. In a nutshell its role, is becoming information manufacturing. It is the business of information manufacturing systems. Data centers are information factories and the IT staff are information builders.
This is a profound shift in thinking that will have significant implications for the future of IT department, IT professionals and the business.

This report from analyst group Quocirca discusses how extending managed print services (MPS) to the cloud, through standardisation of infrastructure, virtualised server resources and automated processes, will be a major paradigm shift.

If the IT department were a standalone company then it would be in the throes of a gradual decline from a position of market dominance to being a niche player at best, or disappearing completely.
Fortunately for CIOs the IT function has a degree of protection; organisations cannot switch technology overnight – they have too much invested in legacy systems and infrastructure, and issues such as security need to be managed by someone with the right skills and experience.
But for newer systems organisations are beginning to look beyond the IT function to cloud-based services that they believe can be procured and used without any involvement from IT.

In this 11-page buyer’s guide, Computer Weekly looks at how to find the best hybrid cloud provider for your organisation, how the shift to hybrid cloud will change the traditional role of the infrastructure manager and how Microsoft is catching up with the cloud market with its Azure offering.

This survey of more than 200 organisations by analyst group Elearnity assesses the HR trends, drivers and challenges facing companies in Europe. It shows the top technology priorities for HR technology are quality analytics, quality HR systems, adopting next generation HR technology, and business systems integration.

What we mean by convergence is the coming together of three irresistible forces—media, technology, and creativity—to meet an immovable object: the enterprise
We ’re only at the beginning of understanding these dynamics, but we do know one thing: Businesses have to change themselves quickly and dramatically if they want to survive and thrive.
They need to rethink how they communicate with customers, the experiences they create, and how they are set up.
The key, as Bob Lord, CEO and Ray Velez, CTO of razorfish, explain this extract from their book, Converge, is to fully recognize the collision that ’s occurred and remake the company to deal with it.

To the untrained observer, the concept of BYOD is simple: bring in consumer devices and save money. However, this is often based on the incorrect assumption that device costs constitute a significant portion of enterprise mobility spend.
In reality, the device cost typically makes up less than 10 percent of a company’s annual mobility spend compared to voice and data, support costs, developer costs, and management software.
In return, the challenges of BYOD can increase the other 90 percent of spend to the point where BYOD will actually increase overall costs without providing any tangible benefits.

Attackers are increasingly turning to human psychology and the study of password selection patterns among user groups to develop sophisticated techniques that can quickly and effectively recover passwords.
Passwords are commonly protected by applying a one-way cryptographic algorithm that produces a hash of set length given any password as input. However, cryptography can only protect something to the point where the only feasible attack on the encrypted secret is to try to guess it. When it comes to passwords, guessing can be easy.

Organizations in different business sectors and countries have different business requirements and risk tolerances. The O-ISM3 framework helps information Security Managers to evaluate their own operating environment and to plan their security management processes so they are consistent with and cost-effective for their organization’s business objectives.

More organisations are reporting increases in investment in technology than at any time since 2006 as business confidence returns and companies act fast to play catch up on their digital offering.
This is according the 16th annual Harvey Nash CIO Survey, representing the views of more than 3,200 Chief Information Officers (CIOs) and Technology leaders from across more than thirty countries, with a combined technology spend of over $160bn. The Survey is one of the largest and most comprehensive polls of technology leaders in the world.
As the global economy begins to recover, organisations are ramping up their investment in digital, mobile and online which has had a further knock on effect in the growing skills shortage, with almost two-thirds of companies reporting that lack of access to the right technology talent is holding back their digital strategy.

Find out how two leading CIOs have enabled their organisations to use information technology as strategic driver, in this extract from the book Strategic IT. In this extract Dana Deasy, Global CIO of BP and Chris Scalet, Senior Vice President and CIO share their thoughts on the key attributes IT leaders need to make a difference in their organisations.

Accenture Research recently conducted a survey that evaluated 15,000 consumers across 20 countries to rank their shopping experiences across channels.
The research suggests that consumers may be having second thoughts about the benefits of online shopping. And no one should write off stores just yet.
These findings clearly challenge some commonly held assumptions about what consumers want. They also indicate that retailers struggling to provide a seamless, cross-channel customer experience may need to re-think key aspects of their approach

This briefing from leading European law firms highlights the key legal issues in France, Germany, UK and Italy companies should consider when taking action against employees misuse of social media.
The briefing is based on a seminar by the law firms: SKW (Germany), Portolano (Italy), Bersay (France), at the offices of Kemp Little (UK) in London on 30th April 2013.

There is a huge amount of human expertise and time being wasted by the majority of IT operations teams. Increased automation is one of the most effective ways to overcome this problem.
Only when the tools and services to achieve this are in place can the industrialisation of IT management processes begin. IT operations teams will then have more time to focus on transformation, innovation and deployment of new applications in the interests of the businesses they serve.

After more than 50 years, the Computer Age as we’ve known it is ending. And what will replace it—perhaps we’ll call it the Informatics Age—will be a kind of Copernican Revolution in knowledge.
That is, humans will no longer be the center of the data solar system, with all of the billions of devices orbiting around us, but will rather become just another player, another node, in an increasingly autonomous data universe.

This is the fourth annual Technology Industry Survey, produced by Computer Weekly and Mortimer Spinks. This year, 3,408 technology professionals shared their views on everything from how cautious they are with their personal data to how they feel about their current employer and what really keeps them happy at work.

This is the fourth of six part guide which explains the key steps of the Strategic Execution Framework, developed by the Stanford Advanced Management Programme.
The Synthesis domain is where plans turn into reality – where companies ensure their planned portfolio of project-based work maps to the actual projects and programs that are being executed. It is the true test of an organization’s commitment to its strategy and ability to execute against it.
Any gap between planned and actual reflects a lack of consistency and threatens an organization’s ability to achieve its goals.
The Framework is designed to help organizations ensure they stay focused on the initiatives essential to accelerating innovation, increase performance, manage change as well as scale the business.

This is the fifth of a six part guide which explains the key steps of the Strategic Execution Framework, developed by the Stanford Advanced Management Programme.
The Engagement domain is central to strategic execution. It’s where strategy turns into action by engaging in a portfolio of project-based work that will move the business forward.
The ability to choose and fund the right projects and programs is based on clarity around goals, metrics and strategy. Without clarity it’s easy to veer off course and work on projects that aren’t aligned with your objectives and strategies.
The Framework is designed to help organizations ensure they stay focused on the initiatives essential to accelerating innovation, increase performance, manage change as well as scale the business.

This is the final part of a six part guide which explains the key steps of the Strategic Execution Framework, developed by the Stanford Advanced Management Programme.
The Transition domain is the ultimate measure of success – moving the results of project-based work into the mainstream of operations. It is where an organization delivers on its goals or not, completing the cycle from strategy through execution.
The Framework is designed to help organizations ensure they stay focused on the initiatives essential to accelerating innovation, increase performance, manage change as well as scale the business.

Today’s CIO is uniquely positioned to lead innovation and drive transformation across the modern enterprise. That is an indisputable fact.
The real question is this: Will CIOs seize the day? Will they leverage their opportunities to become truly transformational leaders?
If you are an IT executive, you are uniquely qualified to provide leadership in the modern enterprise. Step up and enjoy your moment in the sun. You deserve it.
Hunter Miller explains how CIOs can lead transformation in their organisations in this extract from his book Leading The Epic Revolution.
Download includes a 30% discount for Computer Weekly readers

Developing the business conversations for IT – how can you convince your business stakeholders to include you?
Rob Lambert, visiting fellow at Cranfield School of Management, offers advice to CIOs on developing business cases and maximising the business value of digital technology projects.
The presentation covers, tips expressing the organisational value of digital technology, a framework for business stakeholder analysis and benefits realisation, and tips for understanding the implications for IT investment & governance.

The concept of “agile” has recently come to the fore, typically in connection with technical activities, such as software development. Subsequently, the agile approach has been extended and applied to, for example, solution architecture activities.
However, we suggest that agile is in fact a way of working, a mindset. It applies to more than just software development, or architecture, or any other one area of activity.
The real benefit comes from applying an end-to-end agile delivery approach throughout the enterprise.

Analysts Bob Tarzey and Bernt Østergaard look at the issues around the adoption of cloud-based services, security technology that is being deployed by enthusiasts and looks at the reasons why the avoiders are holding back.

UHF radio frequency identification (RFID) promises vastly improved data collection and the analysis of physical objects from consumables to patients. Before its full potential can be exploited, it is critical that security surrounding its use is effectively implemented to ensure the data itself is not exploited

In this 11-page buyer’s guide, Computer Weekly looks at how SDN can give IT administrators greater control over the network infrastructure and make it a far more flexible and agile part of the business.

Airports are spending a larger slice of their revenues on technology as they look to improve the passenger experience and meet the expected demand for air travel.
Airport IT spending has grown at a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 12% since 2010 this major study from SITA reveals.

Apps are now becoming critical to product and service leadership in just about every industry sector.
They represent the future of how enterprises interact with customers, employees, part­ners and machines, as we increasingly access the Inter­net and control our world from the palms of our hands.
This report from CSC describes the Apps rEvolution: an evolution in technology that is creating revolutionary business and personal change.

Whether it’s Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, businesses are now expected to have a social media presence. But if you haven’t made a start or you’re dabbling without a proper strategy, then it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. How does it work? How much of my time will it take? When will I see the benefit? What do I do to get heard?
This extract from Adam Gray’s book, Brilliant Social Media will help you get started straightway, then refine and improve your strategy to get real business results. Social media is easy when you know how.

All is not always as it appears when users access public Wi-Fi networks via seemingly authentic and trustworthy providers.
This article, in our Royal Holloway Information Security Thesis series seeks to raise awareness of the underexposed risks for identity and data theft by exploring the status quo and potential developments for minimising those risks.

A weakness in the permissions architecture of the Android platform means that apps could gain access to functionality without a user’s knowledge or consent, leaving them open to exploitation or abuse by attackers.
Changes to the way the Android platform authorises permission requests could compromise the security of unwary users.

Requirements management is an important activity in the process of designing and managing enterprise architectures. Requirements from various stakeholders form the basis for any change to an organization and its architecture. The quality of these requirements, the extent to which they are realized, and the ease with which they can be changed, determine the quality of any enterprise architecture.
Nonetheless, many enterprise architecture modeling techniques focus on what the enterprise should do by representing “as-is” and “to-be” architectures in terms of informational, behavioral, and structural models at the different architectural layers (e.g., business, application, and technical infrastructure). Little or no attention is paid to represent (explicitly) the reasons; i.e., the why, behind the to-be architectures in terms of motivations, rationale, goals, and requirements.

In this 10-page buyer’s guide, Computer Weekly looks at best practice for software asset management, the attention and funding required to fully exploit it and how businesses can make sense of often complex terms and conditions.

The network is a dynamic place and the knock-on impact on the rest of IT is more than just a case of occasional lost connectivity or slow response.
This report contains 11 short articles that look not just at direct wide area network (WAN)issues, but also at other areas of the ITC platform and the possible impact on an organisation.

Marketing hype claims that cloud computing can help any enterprise meet most IT service needs at a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and higher return on investment (ROI).
However, the promise of the cloud requiring minimal capital investment and the subjectivity of some cloud benefits have created some confusion among IT professionals trying to determine the benefits of adopting cloud services.
Calculating ROI for cloud services requires some up-front work to understand business requirements, organizational, maturity, control considerations and regulatory requirements and to quantify benefits and costs associated with the cloud model that the enterprise has selected. Strategic benefits could be more subjective and may require additional analysis to measure their financial impact over the investment.
To determine whether the cloud is a viable option, it is necessary to separate the hype from reality. Calculating ROI does not need to be complex because it is only an estimate to support investment decisions; however, it must be accurate and based on realistic expectations

Companies that are considering moving to a cloud computing model need effective metrics and analytics to help guide their decisions. This cloud framework is designed to help assess the financial risks of moving to the cloud.
This paper is aimed at private or public entities with more than 500 employees, and considers risk from their perspective

This six-page Computer Weekly Buyer's Guide to networking highlights the factors CIOs and senior IT professionals need to consider as they plan strategies for cloud computing and virtualisation networks.

This seven-page Buyer's Guide to Cloud Computing details the kinds of cloud offering that CIOs and senior IT professionals will need to take into account as they plan future outsourcing, hosting and application strategies.

This Computer Weekly Buyers guide gives you guidance to help you plan and execute your private cloud strategy.
Are energy-efficient private cloud datacentres at an industry tipping point, or is it all merely market hype?

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an architectural style that supports service orientation. A service is a business task with an externalized service description that often represents a contract between a provider and a consumer.
As organizations adopt SOA and the use of services as the fundamental structuring element of their architecture, they increasingly encounter the need to assess where they are in their migration path and how best to achieve the expected benefit derived from integrating and investing in greater levels of SOA maturity.

This article in our Royal Holloway Security Series argues that personal and sensitive application data stored on smartphones is not as secure as people think and looks at controls that can reduce the risk.

Lack of diversity in software and operating systems over many years has left a large number of computers vulnerable to memory program attacks. A diversified and replicated execution system promises to provide effective countermeasures.

Adrian Drury, Consulting Director and Practice Leader at Ovum , highlights some of the key IT trends we can expect to see in 2014.
In this presentation, given to Computer Weekly's 500 Club for IT leaders, Adrian Drury talks about the business trends IT leaders need to look out for in 2014.

Cloud computing underpins an important part of economic activity today, and has the potential to make a major contribution to future growth.
To deliver its anticipated benefits, it must be easy to use and cost-efficient. This means that enterprises and individuals must be able to use cloud products and services as far as possible “off the shelf”.
The products and services should work together, and minimal effort should be needed to incorporate them into a user’s systems.
This is the case for the basic Internet, but not yet for the additional components that constitute the cloud. Lack of portability of and interoperability between these components could mean that the potential of cloud computing is not fulfilled.
This guide analyses cloud computing portability and interoperability. It makes recommendations to customers on how best to achieve portability and interoperability when working with current cloud products and services. It makes recommendations to suppliers and standards bodies on how standards and best practice should evolve to enable greater portability and interoperability in the future.

This article, drawing on sources including interviews with cloud computing providers, users and other market actors, is the first in-depth research into how cloud contracts are negotiated.
In particular, we have focused on instances where users have requested changes to providers’ standard terms, and the extent to which providers agreed to those changes.
We have found that the terms that generated the most negotiation were provider liability, service level agreements, data protection and security, termination rights, unilateral amendments to service features, and intellectual property rights.

Cloud computing could end up being a hindrance rather than a help to an enterprise if not planned and implemented properly.
In many infrastructure and operations (I&O) teams, it can be observed that previous failures are repeating themselves over and over. Very few organisations are mature enough in terms of people and process capabilities to be able to take cues from past failures and prepare themselves for the foreseeable as well as the unforeseen future.

With IT such a large energy drain for many organisations, firms that cut IT power consumption will reap big benefits.
Going green means that computer room air conditioners and chillers are no longer required in the datacentre, potentially slashing energy costs by up to 50% and dramatically lowering the facility’s carbon footprint.

This White Paper describes a Decision Tree that could be used to help you discover where Cloud opportunities and solutions might fit in your organization. It is put forward for discussion, with the intention that this discussion, and validation in the field, will result in a practical tool for use by enterprises.
Your business situation is either a problem or an opportunity for which you are seeking a solution that includes IT enablement. This Tree presupposes that the current and/or future state of the IT resources for your business situation does and/or will not meet requirements.
If you are a Cloud seller, then use this Decision Tree in reverse to determine for which business situations your proposed offering would be a good fit.

This book provides the most in-depth guide to deploying and maintaining a secure Windows network. The book drills down into all the new features of Windows 2012 and provides practical, hands-on methods for securing your Windows systems networks, including: secure remote access, network vulnerabilities and mitigations, Windows personal firewall, and network diagnostics and troubleshooting.
This extract offers an introduction to Windows 8, Windows Server 2012, and IPv6

Financial institutions are facing significant changes of the environment in which they operate. For example, the financial crisis, changing customer behavior, increased risk awareness, focus on cost reduction, and the entrance of new financial players in the market-place have structurally changed the financial industry.
Not only the operations, but also the supporting IT required a challenging transformational change. Given the close inter-dependency of operations and IT in financial institutions, a carefully planned and guided integrated approach to change is required. Enterprise architecture is key to enabling such change initiatives.

This paper from the Open Group, documents an approach to enhance the TOGAF enterprise architecture methodology with the SABSA security architecture approach to create one holistic architecture methodology.

This extract from Bart Baesen's book gives an overview of big data and analytics, its applications, analytic models, and job profiles in analytics, and includes a discount code for Computer Weekly readers.

Computer Weekly looks at how organisations are gathering intelligence to stay ahead of emerging threats; the importance of gathering data throughout an incident; and the impact of context-aware security.

It can be tempting to stray from the security roadmap security professionals have put in place when data breaches like the Sony and Anthem breaches are all over the news. But experts say it's crucial to stick to the security basics.

The Open Data Platform has arrived, but not all Hadoop vendors are on board. The initiative, aimed at boosting interoperability, formed a backdrop for discussion at the Strata + Hadoop World 2015 conference.